IT WAS ONE OF THOSE DAYS

Oh about six years ago when my next to the last good neve had run across Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee et al. juat once, or twice too often. And was just about to snap. So I took it out on my poor, defenseless  keyboard. Time has passed. Some of the names may have changed, although Huckabee reared his Jurassic Park head the other day. And note on the progressives. Sorry. IMHO the damage is done and Christianity in America is just about as dead as the Dodo. I can't find much difference between the fundies who want to blame everybody on one side and some progressives who want to blame everybody on the other. Hindsight may be 20/20. Trying to figure out how the future is going to work out when too many players have their fingers on the scales has always been a crap shoot. The deck is stacked and the dice are loaded. deal with it. Gee, I'm almost as cranky today.

It's turning out to be that kind of a day. I wonder how the Bachmanns, Palins, Huckabees, Limbaughs, Becks, and Santorums of this country would react if our response to their religious polemics was a hearty "I don't give a damn what you believe because I don't share those beliefs and I refuse to bow down to them." And if you try to impose them on me I'll fight you. Oh and try this. Tell them Jesus wasn't a Christian and watch their head explode.

In a kind of a sad way I get a kick out of reading progressive oriented Christians that are trying to find a way to salvage the faith and undo the damage done by the fundagelicals over the last thirty years or so. Make that the last thousand years or so. You know what I've discovered? I don’t care.  I really don’t. The Quaker path speaks to me, but not fully. Celtic spirituality oriented towards the Druids and/or shamanism speaks to me. But, again, not fully. Fortunately there are some brave hybrid souls who have started to clear a path for the rest of us. Check out Quaker Pagan Reflections or Under the Oak. The links are on the sidebar. Especially Under the Oak. It’s a Patheos sponsored website to there will be other sites that might be interesting. The Wild Hunt website has some good information too, technical, but good. 

And the folks who came up with nothing better than “spiritual but not religious” to cover everybody who doesn't fit in their neat little categories can take that term and stick where the sun doesn't shine. Anybody asks me where my spirit is right now is  going to get a, hopefully polite, invitation to mind their own business. Because, now listen very carefully, it really is none of your business. And fortunately, for now at least, Caesar is no longer in the business ensuring my attendance of any worship service, anywhere at anytime. To the Madisons, Adams, Jeffersons, Henry’s of the founding generation; I raise my glass of nice, fresh apple cider in a hale and hearty “thank you.’

You mind your business. I’ll mind mine. And if your “business” interferes with mine I’ll fight you root, twig and branch. I will not be polite about it. That really is the biggest part of the problem isn't it? Most of us were raised to be courteous even if the other guy is rude, weren't we. Well we don't exactly have to be rude, hopefully. But, a firm, no nonsense "get the hell out of my face, space, life" should be sufficient. They'll be so shocked it might even work. It's not like the fundies are known for their courtesy to rest of us, after all. 

I won’t attempt to cap bible verses with you. Blather on all you want. I do not believe that the moldering collection of scripture is without mistakes. I do not believe the collection is complete. I do not believe in taking those scriptures literally. I do believe that they are a record of human beings trying to find their way through the universe in their lifetimes. And I do not believe that God, the Goddess of some combination thereof stopped speaking to human beings in this lifetime just because a group of religious leaders with their own axes to grind said so.

I refuse to look at the marvelous gift of Creation and see only a set of traps meant to test my faith or lead me astray. What a sorry, fearful view of their Creator the fundies have. Are you sure you haven’t created something in your own image and now claim it to be “god?” And worse insist that I worship it with you. There's the door, don't let it hit you on the way out and that click you hear is me turning the deadbolt. 

The short version? Your right to swing your religious weight around ends at my bonfire, medicine wheel, dream catcher, unfinished reading list. And the sooner the fundgelicals realize that the rest of us not only won’t put up with their crap, we actually don't care anymore and aren't coming out to play,  the happier most of us will be.